Ɛpsilon

To G. J. Romanes   2 September 1881

Down, | Beckenham, Kent. | (Railway Station | Orpington. S.E.R.)

Sept 2d. 1881.

My dear Romanes.

Your letter has perplexed me beyond all measure.1 I fully recognise the duty of everyone, whose opinion is worth anything, expressing his opinion publicly on vivisection; & this made me send my letter to the Times.—2 I have been thinking at intervals all morning what I could say, & it is the simple truth that I have nothing worth saying. You & men like you, whose ideas flow freely & who can express them easily, cannot understand the state of mental paralysis in which I find myself.

What is most wanted is a careful & accurate attempt to show what physiology has already done for man, & even still more strongly what there is every reason to believe it will hereafter do.— Now I am absolutely incapable of doing this, or of discussing the other points suggested by you.—

If you wish for my name (& I shd. be glad that it shd appear with that of others in the same cause) could you not quote some sentence from my letter in the Times, which I enclose, but please return it.— If you thought fit you might say that you quoted it with my approval, & that after still further reflexion I still abide most strongly in my expressed conviction. For Heaven’s sake, do think of this.— I do not grudge the labour & thought, but I could write nothing worth anyone reading.

Allow me to demur to your calling your conjoint article a “symposium”,—strictly a “drinking party”.3 This seems to me very bad taste, & I do hope everyone of you will avoid any semblance of a joke on the subject.— I know that words, like a joke, on this subject have quite disgusted some persons not at all inimical to physiology.— One person lamented to me that Mr Simon in his truly admirable Address at the Medical Congress (by far the best thing which I have read) spoke of the “fantastic sensuality” (or some such term) of the many mistaken, but honest men & women who are half mad on the subject.4

Do pray try & let me escape & quote my letter, which in some respects is more valuable as giving my independent judgment before the Medical Congress.—

I really cannot imagine what I could say.—

I will now turn to another subject: My little book on Worms has been long finished, but Murray was so strongly opposed to publishing it at the dead season, that I yielded.5 I have told the Printers to send you a set of clean sheets, which you can afterwards have stitched together.— There is hardly anything in it which can interest you.—

Two or three papers by Hermann Müller have just appeared in Kosmos, which seem to me interesting as showing how soon, i.e. after how many attempts, Bees learn how best to suck a new flower.6 There is also, a good & laudatory review of Dr. Roux.—7

I could lend you Kosmos if you think fit.—

You will perhaps have seen that my poor dear brother Erasmus has just died, & he was buried yesterday here at Down.8

Many thanks for your kind invitation to my sons, none of whom are likely to be in Scotland.9

Yours very sincerely | Charles Darwin

1
Romanes had invited CD to contribute to a ‘symposium-like series of short essays’ on vivisection that would be published in the monthly magazine Nineteenth Century (letter from G. J. Romanes, 31 August 1881).
2
CD had published a letter on vivisection in The Times, 18 April 1881, p. 10; he published a second letter (in reply to a response to his first by Frances Power Cobbe) in The Times, 22 April 1881, p. 11 (see letter to Frithiof Holmgren, [14] April 1881, and letter to The Times, 21 April [1881]).
3
The editor of the Nineteenth Century, James Thomas Knowles, had introduced the ‘symposium’ format to present contrasting viewpoints on a controversial topic (Cantor et al. 2004, p. 23). By the nineteenth century, ‘symposium’ had come to mean a ‘collection of opinions’ or a ‘series of articles’ by a number of people on a specific topic, although it originally referred to a convivial meeting for the purpose of drinking and intellectual entertainment (OED).
4
On 3 August 1881, John Simon had spoken in defence of vivisection in an address at the opening of the State Medicine Section of the seventh International Medical Congress, criticising those who judged animal experimentation on the basis of mere sentiment or ‘aesthetics’, which he characterised as a ‘feeble form of sensuality’ (J. Simon 1882, p. 22). CD may have heard Simon’s address when he attended the congress on 3 August (see letter to W. E. Darwin, 4 August [1881]).
5
CD had sent the manuscript of Earthworms to his publisher on 10 April 1881, requesting speedy publication (see letter to R. F. Cooke, 10 April 1881); this request was strongly opposed and the book was not published until 10 October (see letter from R. F. Cooke, 28 July 1881 and n. 1). Romanes had read a draft of the second chapter in March 1881 (see letter from G. J. Romanes, 7 March 1881).
6
CD refers to the separate parts of H. Müller 1881b.
7
Wilhelm Roux’s book Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus. Ein Beitrag zur Vervollständigung der mechanischen Zweckmässigkeitslehre (The struggle of the parts in the organism. A contribution to the completion of the mechanistic theory of fitness; Roux 1881) was reviewed in Kosmos 9 (1881): 398–401.
8
Erasmus Alvey Darwin died on 26 August 1881 (CD’s ‘Journal’ (Appendix II)).
9
In his letter of 31 August 1881, Romanes had given an open invitation to CD’s sons to visit him in Garvock, Perthshire, while he was carrying out research on marine zoology in Scotland (E. D. Romanes 1896, p. 97).

Manuscript Alterations and Comments

0.1 (Railway … S.E.R.)] parentheses added
3.4 still] interl
3.5 in] above del ‘with’
4.5 Address] ‘A’ over ‘a’
4.6 thing] altered from ‘think’
11.1 none of] interl

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13312,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-13312